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I tried these 4 bizarre operating systems—here’s how it went
I'm no stranger to weird operating systems. I've run Tails from a USB stick (an OS that blew the lid off the NSA) and installed a 50 MB operating system to revive a decade-old PC. And I thought I'd seen it all.
Turns out, I was wrong. There's a whole world of experimental operating systems out there that most people have never heard of. So I loaded up my Ventoy USB drive and spent a weekend testing four of the strangest ones I could find.
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Damn Small Linux (DSL) was the answer to the question "how much can you pack into 50MB?". The original version fit on a business card CD and proved you didn't need gigabytes for a working desktop.
The project went quiet for years, then came back in 2024 with a 700MB version. It's built on antiX 23 i386, which means it'll run on ancient hardware—first-gen Intel Core chips, Pentium 4 desktops, stuff you probably forgot you still had.
I installed it on my old Dell Inspiron with 4GB of RAM. It booted in less than 15 seconds from the power button to the desktop. Honestly, impressive for a decade-old laptop.